DONCASTER, UK — XR innovator Martin Taylor and ex-Disney EP Alistair Maclean-Clark have formed Prox & Reverie (https://proxandreverie.com), a new XR production and immersive entertainment studio. Prox & Reverie aims to provide a complete service to creatives and brands looking to harness the power of mixed reality technology. Their purpose-built studio system - dubbed 'The Forge' - contains interactive production tools from Varjo, Oculus, Xsens motion capture, Manus, Faceware and Vive, to name a few.
Inside The Forge’s 2,000-square-foot stage, users will experience accelerated world building for virtual production, performance capture, volumetric capture, pre-visualization and simulation, and volumetric capture. Using leading realtime engines, such as Unity and Unreal, Prox & Reverie’s studio can generate motion capture-driven avatars and explorable virtual universes that quickly merge digital and real-world realities for screen, for location-based installations and to unlock the power of the Metaverse.
“We are more than just a virtual production studio,” explains Taylor. “Our emphasis in The Forge’s convergence volume is to empower content makers to explore and test their XR content ideas quickly and then push the boundaries of what’s possible, because The Forge exists as a new kind of production canvas. The goal is to point every leading XR tool and technique into a single modular volume and have it move and adapt to the user’s imagination. Inside The Forge, you can experiment, create, prototype, simulate, build and deliver any kind of immersive audience experiences.”
Brands, studios and creatives can tap The Forge to produce a range of experiences, including immersive previs of films and television shows, music videos, broadcast productions and immersive installations, visualizations and interactive XR events. Rather than creating experiences that adopt mixed reality technology into an existing studio design, Prox & Reverie is exploring what makes up a studio of the future, where immersive and screen media are produced in lockstep.
“The entertainment industry has seen an explosion in the use of virtual production techniques over the past year, with a specific focus on the use of LED walls for set extension and realtime CGI,” notes Maclean-Clark. “Prox & Reverie was launched to level up the immersive aspects of mixed reality by tapping into the full potential of XR technology, providing truly interactive experiences that allow creators to create and viewers to step into and experience photorealistic fictional realities.”